Speech recognition can be awesome – when it works. Talk too quickly, or where there’s too much ambient noise, and your phone may struggle to tell “sushi restaurant” from “suits cheap resting hot.” Microsoft is apparently interested in tweaking Windows Phone’s speech recognition to help it perform better in even challenging situations, and a leaked video shows the company demonstrating its new system at its recent TechFest.

First up, the new system used by Bing search is faster, getting the job done half a second quicker than in the past. The faster processing means that “streaming” recognition is now possible, showing you what you’re saying word-by-word, and thereby offering search results in less time.

Accuracy is also up, and Microsoft says there’s about a 12% improvement in error rates. Those improvements could be even more significant by the time the new system launches, maybe even gaining another 15% in the process.

Some of the changes, like a move to new servers, have already begun to be implemented, but it could still be some time before all of this is available to Windows Phone users.